On Sunday the White House welcomed a controversial head of state who got his start as chieftain of a 'child army' in a 1990s genocide, presides over the world's biggest safe haven for rapists, and has been linked to the murders of human rights activists.

Joseph Kabila, president of the Democratic Republic of Congo, has given Barack Obama a continent-sized black eye, and this week 's high-profile U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit – the largest-ever gathering of African leaders by an American president – is barely underway.

On Tuesday night Kabila will be a guest at a White House dinner hosted by the president and first lady, and reverberations are beginning to echo around Capitol Hill.

'Kabila is everything that’s wrong with Africa rolled up into one evil package,' a senior congressional aide close to the Senate Foreign Affairs Committee told MailOnline on Monday.

'Having him to dinner at the White House and giving him equal footing with countries like South Africa and Morocco is embarrassing and just plain wrong.'

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Legitimacy: A friendly Secretary of State John Kerry (R) appeared Monday alongside Congolese president Joseph Kabila (L) before a bilateral meeting during the U.S.-Africa Leaders Summit in Washington, without a mention of Kabila's human rights problems at home

On good terms: Kabila was greeted warmly at a US Air Force base near Washington after his plane arrived, despite his dodgy human rights record and ties to past mass-killings

'Kadogos': Kabila led a mini-army of thousands of child soldiers like this young teen (C), overseeing their conscription into armies in the eastern Congo region and in Rwanda -- often snatched from their homes by armed men, forced to fight and kill, and beaten if they refused

Kabila is among a group of 50 African leaders whom Obama invited for this week's three-day event. Secretary of State John Kerry posed with him for cameras on Monday morning.

The Congo's leader brings with him accusations of $15 billion in looted funds, an alleged history of bribing legislators, a domestic death toll in the millions, and nationwide fears that he will refuse to leave office after he is constitutionally 'termed out' in 2016.

The White House has been quick to brush it all off.

'All African countries in good standing with the AU [African Union] and the United States were invited to the summit,' National Security Council assistant press secretary Ned Price told MailOnline.

The Obama administration, he said, looks forward to 'an opportunity to discuss a range of topics' with the participants, 'including any potential disagreements we might have.'

Jennifer Cooke, director of the Africa program at the Center for Strategic and International Studies, told MailOnline that the White House likely 'didn’t want to have the summit overshadowed in Africa by controversy over who makes the guest list.'

'There are a number of leaders with extremely poor human rights records coming,' she said, 'who, individually, would not likely be feted with a bilateral meeting or White House visit.

'It’s a bit of a conundrum for the White House. It will get flak from human rights defenders and others for inviting certain individuals, but will likely offend a good number of African leaders and citizens if it tries to parse out too finely who makes the cut.'

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The summit schedule published by the White House last week is long on economics and trade but mentions nothing about human rights subjects.

On Sunday Kabila received the same warm official welcome at Andrews Air Force Base enjoyed by the leaders of American free-trade partners and other friendly nations.

Kabila stands out as a strongman's strongman, even compared to other premiers who rose to power in the shadow of epic bloodbaths. It's taken 20,000 United Nations troops, the largest multinational peacekeeping force in the organization's history, to keep some semblance of order.

Estimates of the dead from two wars in two decades range up to 5.4 million, spanning Kabila's rule and that of his father Laurent Kabila.

Following the elder Kabila's assassination in 2001, his son took over at age 30 as the youngest head of state in the world.

Assuming control was a natural step for Joseph: He played a featured role in the rebellion that brought his father, then a Rwandan rebel leader, to power in the Congo.

In 1994 the world's outrage was focused on eastern Africa, where Congolese militias from the Hutu ethnic group massacred Rwandans from the Tutsi tribe by the hundreds of thousands during a 100-day campaign of terror.

When Rwanda's Tutsi majority retaliated, Laurent Kabila took charge and toppled Zaire's dictator Mobutu Sese Seko, renaming the country the Democratic Republic of the Congo.

Joseph Kabila led a significant part of his army, brigades of 'children soldiers' populated by thousands of 'kadogos,' conscripted boys.

Human Rights Watch, an American NGO, interviewed three of those boys in 2000. They had been recruited at ages ranging from 13 to 17, plucked up by Rwandan soldiers on their way home from school and church.

Birthday salute: President Obama is spending his 53rd birthday away from the spotlight of his Africa summit, but will attract naysayers all week from the human rights community

Horrific: Tantini Kahindu, 16, was raped along with 280 other women and girls in 2010 when Hutu militia rebels stormed their town. The mass-sexual assault was punishment for the villagers' support for the government's Congolese Defense Forces

Sightseeing: Dr. Jill Biden, wife of the US vice president, visited the Congo in July to promote female empowerment in education and business, something that takes a back seat to basic health and safety for most Congolese women

'They gave us wooden sticks shaped like guns' to train with, said one. 'If you lost it, you'd be killed.'

Another told researchers that some boys in his group were as young as ten.

'Lots were killed in the training,' he said. 'Lots died of sickness.'

The violence has never stopped, and some of it has extended to Kabila's domestic watchdogs.

In June 2010 Floribert Chebeya, the leader of the Congo's most visible human rights group, was killed near Kinshasa along with an aide who was driving him.

Chebeya died in the back seat of his car hours after a scheduled appointment to meet with General John Numbi, the Congolese police chief.

The meeting never happened. When Chebeya's body was found, he was bleeding from his nose, eyes and ears. Women's hair and condoms were scattered on the seat next to him.

His driver's body was never recovered.

On good terms: Kabila was greeted warmly at a US Air Force base near Washington as his plane arrived, despite his dodgy human rights record and ties to past mass-killings

In the days following the high-profile killing, the Congolese newspaper Congo Indépendant published an interview with a member of the national police force who said he fled to Uganda after witnessing the murder.

The man, later identified as Paul Mwilambwe, said Chebeya and his driver were on a 'long list of people to be executed' because they became 'troublemakers who were circling around the power of our president.'

Mwilambwe said he watched on a security camera as fellow officers suffocated Chebeya with a plastic bag and placed the hairs, the condoms and a bottle of Viagra next to the body.

He later told journalists that his boss, a police colonel, told him that he 'received the order' to kill the activist 'from the president of the republic via General John Numbi.'

Kabila has never directly denied the charge, and his government's prosecutions never rose higher than the colonel.

Four men including the colonel, plus Mwilambwe and two others tried in absentia, were sentenced to death.

Mwilambwe will soon be tried in Senegal, where he has been in exile, under a law that permits prosecution of residents for crimes committed elsewhere.

But the UN's investigator for extrajudicial executions, Philip Alston, told the United Nations Human Rights Council that Chebeya 'was killed in circumstances which strongly suggest official responsibility,'

Clashes between national armies and flagless militias in the eastern Congo have left more than dead bodies in their wake: Nearly 3 million Congolese were displaced from their homes by tribal violence last year alone.

More than 60 percent of the nation's people live on less than $1 per day.

But the Congo holds an estimated $24 trillion in natural riches beneath its soil. Most of the country's conflicts are over those minerals, which armed groups sell to finance the purchase of more weapons and ammunition.

Homicidal warlords aren't the only destabilizing forces diverting resources one mine at a time.

Forbes reported in June that Kabila has himself looted $15 billion from his country and stashed it in offshore accounts, and that his brother Soulemane has pilfered another $300 million.

The Congolese government denies it.

But in 2011 British Labour MP Eric Joyce exposed $5.5 billion in questionable wealth transfers from the Congo.

Kabila, he said, 'has sold vast mining assets at knock down prices to various off-shore "shell" companies' controlled by a longtime friend.

'Look, we all know how this works,' an official with a multinational NGO told MailOnline on Sunday, on the condition that his name be withheld. 'These guys have known each other for 25 years. Whenever Kabila rides off into the sunset, a massive cut of that money will be waiting for him.'

Kabila mugged for cameras with Kerry in May after the U.S. promised to help drive out rebel factions and contribute $30 million toward elections -- but only if the strongman steps down in 2016; he has begun to show signs that he will try to change the Congolese constitution to lengthen his presidency

Eleven months ago Kabila addressed the UN General Assembly, blaming his nation's weakened economy on 'the persistent selfishness of some states' and 'a globalization that is essentially fuelled by the unbridled pursuit of profit to the exacerbation of poverty.'

In a statement to the United States before this week's White House conference, he asked for 'American direct investment' to prop up his economy.

Kabila is the latest in a line of Congolese strongmen. Mobutu Sese Seko was famous for throwing opposition leaders to lions and watching them being torn apart.

While death threats and the occasional follow-through were his tools of mass control, Kabila's generation has found another way.

Today the Congo is what the UN's Special Representative on Sexual Violence in Conflict Margot Wallström says is the 'rape capital of the world.'

Under Kabila, the Congo's rape culture has swelled.

In 2011 an American Journal of Public Health study found that the attacks had reached the rate of 48 per hour – more than 1,000 rapes per day – in a country whose population is barely one-fifth of America's.

'So far Congo has seen very little accountability' for sexual violence, Holly Dranginis, a Congo expert with The Enough Project told MailOnline.

'And that is sending a message generally, culturally, that rape is okay.'

DEAD: Floribert Chebeya, head of the Congolese human rights group Voice of the Voiceless, was killed in 2010; a fugitive policeman says he witnessed the crime, and claims a police colonel told him President Kabila ordered the man's death

Brutal: In the Democratic Republic of Congo, 12 per cent of the female population have been raped at least once, according to official figures. These women, all rape survivors, were subjects of a documentary called Seeds Of Hope

Rape is endemic in both the Congolese army and Hutu rebel groups that continue to pull loose threads from two wars in the hope of antagonizing kabila and returning the Congo to the control of its Hutu majority.

But whichever group is committing the sexual assaults on any given day, Dranginis said, 'President Kabila has not done enough' to ensure women's basic safety.'

'Accountability and justice, and prosecutions for rape, should be at the top of his list,' she insisted. 'But so far there has been very little justice for victims.'

Kabila's 2011 re-election, his second ballot victory in five years, is another sore spot.

Voting that year was plagued with corruption so widespread that reports surfaced of phony polling places erected to confuse Kabila's opponents. Others reported results without having any ballots to count.

Vital Kamerhe, who ran against Kabila that year, was speaker of the national assembly until he resigned in 2009 because of fears, he told U.S. diplomats, that Kabila would have him harmed or killed.

In a diplomatic cable published by WikiLeaks, then-U.S. Ambassador William Garvelink told the State Department in 2009 that Kabila's aides had bribed three members of Kamerhe's inner circle in the assembly to resign, paying then each $200,000 and leaving Kamerhe without enough support among leadership to survive a vote ousting him.

Kamerhe resigned three weeks later, re-emerging in 2011 as a presidential candidate.

J. Peter Pham, director of the Africa Center at the Atlantic Council, noted in 2012 in The New York Times that those 2011 elections 'were criticized by everyone from the European Union to the country’s Roman Catholic bishops.'

He told MailOnline on Monday that Kabila's 'electoral mandate is of an exceptionally dubious nature.'

More criticism will likely come if opposition leaders are correctly forecasting Kabila's next move. They say he aims to remain in power past 2016, when his country's constitution says he must step down.

An amendment to the Congolese constitution strictly limits the president to two five-year terms. Another provides an explicit firewall against ever repealing that limit by changing the constitution.

Two weeks ago, however, Congolese interior minister Richard Muyej said publicly that a national referendum could wipe it away.

A U.S. State Department official told MailOnline on Sunday that any vote that contemplates keeping Kabila in power past 2016 'would likely be just as corrupt as the 2011 election.'

That official also said some in Kabila's government want to scrap popular-vote elections in favor of letting regional assemblies choose presidents, a system 'that's far more susceptible to corruption, violence and bribery.'

'At that point, their constitution is not worth the paper it's printed on,' he said.

Holly Dranginis, a Congo expert with The Enough Project, told MailOnline that Kabila has done little to hold rapists accountable, sending the message that it's an acceptable part of Congolese culture

Dranginis, of The Enough Project, told MailOnline that 'the Congolese people deserve a president who exhibits consistency in upholding the constitution – that the constitution won't just be changed on the whim of those in power when they feel it's convenient.'

But 'peaceful, democratic, transparent elections that are free of corruption,' she cautioned, 'would have to be something that's important to the leadership' before Congolese citizens could ever expect them on a regular basis.

Kabila seems to drop hint after hint that the word 'democracy' has lost something in translation from his native Swahili.

In central Africa, he wrote in his pre-conference statement last week, governing requires 'parameters that are not transposable from one continent to another or from one country to another.'

He even quoted what he called 'realistic remarks' from the U.S. president during a July 2012 press conference, when he said Africans must 'build their own model of democracy.'

In May, Secretary of State John Kerry offered the Congo $30 million in election and recovery aid, but only if Kabila agrees to step down at the end of his term.

'We're a country with term limits,' he told reporters on a conference call after his meeting with Kabila in Kinshasa. 'We live by them.'

The Embassy of the Democratic Republic of the Congo in Washington did not respond to phone messages and emails seeking comment.